Social Media

Twitter 'Experimenting' With Vine Porn Censorship

Twitter has addressed the topic of six-second porn videos on its service Vine for a second time, admitting that it is "changing how users find and view sensitive content."

On Monday, the company apologized for a "human error" that led to a pornographic video making its Editors' Picks list. The account responsible for that video, NSFWVine, now appears to be blocked on the service.

Also Monday, users began to notice that certain hashtags — such as #porn, #vineporn and #nsfw — were no longer searchable on the service. In our tests, the hashtags did not show up in searches roughly three quarters of the time.

When asked about Vine hashtag removal, a Twitter spokesperson gave Mashable this statement: "We're in the process of changing how users find and view sensitive content. We're experimenting with a number of approaches and will continue to iterate."

In other words, the site is testing ways of censoring the most common hashtags used to find porn on Vine. That doesn't block the offending videos from the service altogether, but it does make the genre harder for users to find.

According to the Guardian, the owners of the NSFWVine account denied it had been blocked. The owners also stated the purpose of the account was to gather Vine videos for a website where they could make money on advertising.

Why anyone would go to a website with six-second clips when pornography is abundant on the rest of the Internet wasn't immediately clear. Still, Twitter evidently feels obliged to make some effort to strike back against such accounts, lest Vine be saddled with a reputation. One possible solution in the long-term: a "safe search" option like the one you'll find on Google Images.

Mashable
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